With the advent of the Internet and other related factors, credit cards have become an increasingly popular means by which to pay for shipping charges. For some transportation companies, such as the United Parcel Service (UPS), this has lead to a substantial increase in the number of monthly billing inquiries that relate to credit card charges. Consider the situation in which a customer discovers a shipping charge on their credit card bill for what they believe is an incorrect amount, either in whole or in part. When this happens, the customer typically contacts the transportation company via phone or e-mail to request that an appropriate refund be applied to their credit card. However, many “in-house” billing systems in the transportation industry, and other such industries, were traditionally not designed to easily and efficiently accommodate such requests. As a result, the carrier would sometimes have to inform the customer that they do not have a way to apply the appropriate credit to the customer's credit card.
In some cases, the carrier might instead suggest that the customer contact their credit card company directly to obtain a refund. Unfortunately, this more often than not resulted in still further inconvenience for the customer, as credit card companies often require such requests to be submitted in writing. If the customer's request is eventually approved by the credit card company, the customer's account is credited and the carrier receives a corresponding “chargeback” for the amount in question. Furthermore, the credit card company, for having to process the request, typically assesses the carrier an additional “chargeback fee” of approximately five or ten dollars, which in many cases is more than the original shipping charge. And once received, the carrier still has to spend the time and money to go off and manually research the validity of the chargeback before honoring it.
To avoid customer dissatisfaction with the above process, transportation companies, and other such companies, sometimes choose to handle such requests. One available option is to provide customers with refund checks instead of applying a credit directly to the customer's credit card. However, the prospect of having to process, generate and mail individual refund checks for what is a growing number of such requests can be cost prohibitive. Alternatively, or additionally, some companies maintain a special customer service division that is solely responsible for manually investigating and processing such requests. Unfortunately, this too has proved exceedingly costly and inefficient in some cases.
Therefore, an unsatisfied need exists in the industry for improved systems and methods for facilitating adjustments to transactions that have been applied to a credit card, or other such payment cards, that overcome the deficiencies in the prior art, some of which are discussed above.